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Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Keep taking the tablets

Incipient colds are lurking at the edges of our physical health.

Toni looks a little groggy and has taken some efficient looking powders to combat the messy effects of our antisocial seasonal afflictions.

As I am still defiantly maintaining a summer wardrobe and stoutly affirming that the ‘summery’ temperatures encourage a beach orientated existence.

Given that the legendary Robert has stayed with us for a night, it was essential that he experience the delights of living by the sea and take at least a nominal plunge into the sea.

We had talked well into the night and it was good to be able to make pretentious conversazione with someone who regarded it as normal! God, when I think back to the talks we had in university, if any of them had been recorded we would have been put away!

Actually now I come to think about it, I did once record a conversation in college. As a joke, when I was preparing a meal and dismembering a frozen chicken with a largely ineffectual carving knife I turned on the cassette recorder (ah, such simple technology) to see how the conversation would develop. I set myself the task of initiating the interchanges with the intention of stimulating my companions to linguistic displays which could be the source of innocent merriment later. But after a few minutes I forgot that we were being recorded.

The ensuring tape, when we finally got to listen to it shocked us by the deeply infantile nature of most of the utterances and the general mood of surrealistically Pinteresque normality of our gnomic mode of communication. One member of the trio recorded took an unhealthy interest in the whole affair and used to borrow the cassette and listen to it in his room. As he was by far the most academic of us one can only wonder what intellectual substance he found in such an inconsequential load of chatter.

I suppose that the sad thing was that we generally thought that we were having conversations of the most profound nature where we were touching the very substance of philosophy itself. Out time would have been much better spent if we hadn’t subscribed to such illusions; but it would have been immeasurably duller!

Robert and my conversations were much more prosaic, but just as enjoyable.

It is also gratifying to find out that my one real skill has not deserted me.

I have always prided myself on being a dependable catalyst for encouraging other people to spend money.

Robert put up a token resistance to buying a 160GB ipod but by the time he was deposited in Barcelona airport to try and discover just which terminal he should have been waiting in for his flight to Syria he was the proud possessor of a gleaming black mp3 machine of Apple manufacture with a remarkably eclectic and stimulating collection of musical tracks!

I will be interested to her what sort of musical Odyssey he makes through my collection of idiosyncratic classics interspersed with oddities that have limited popular appeal. How can I forget going to an ENO performance of ‘Four Saints in Three Acts’ (one of personal favourites) and turning to the lady on m left at the end of the performance and saying breathlessly, “Wasn’t that wonderful!” To which she replied, “No!”

I sometimes plough a lonely furrow!

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